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All Content © Edmund King, 2000.

The way we categorise and interpret old dramatic texts now has been strongly influenced by the work of early twentieth century textual critics. A. W. Pollard (1859 - 1944), R. B. McKerrow (1872 - 1940), W. W. Greg (1875 - 1959) and Peter Alexander (1893 - 1969) rose to prominence in Edwardian England. They were pioneers of the 'New Bibliography' - a group of methodologies intended to place editing on firmly scientific grounds.

McKerrow and Greg graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1897. (It had been the Cambridge Complete Shakespeare of 1863 - 66 which had defined the new, scientifically-orientated editorial approach that the New Bibliographers inherited and improved.) While undergraduates together, they had developed together a set of guiding principles for the editing of Renaissance plays. They applied these in a series of articles and books which began to appear from 1899. Each was an application of methods taken from mathematics and the hard sciences to the field of literary editing. By these means, they could see past the textual surface; they could anatomise a play's structure, see its internal workings, separate the corrupt from the undamaged pieces, guess at its textual history. The New Bibliography would, for the first time, expose English Renaissance dramatic texts to the penetrating gaze of the scientist¹ This is not to say, however, that their approach was some sort of revolutionary break with the past. It had its immediate origins in the eighteenth century, with the editorial work and textual theorizings of Edmond Malone.

Any Renaissance play still extant has persisted through time in textual form. Some survive as single manuscripts, others in many, various, printed editions. When multiple copies of a work exist, they always differ from each other in some way. The modes of textual transmission in sixteenth and seventeenth century England were labour-intensive, and - because they relied upon diligence or lack of innovation at many stages - prone to error. Scribes could alter the manuscripts they copied according to their own linguistic preferences. Compositors in printing houses could misalign passages, misread or miss out words, set verse as prose or vice versa. Because only a certain number of pages (or 'forms') could be set at one time, even books printed in the same house at the same time could vary from one another in their readings. These variations could cause different editions of the same work to differ markedly from each other, and from what was originally written. The common practice of simply reprinting an earlier text to obtain a new edition would allow these errors to accumulate. Old mistakes would remain; new errors would appear via the means just listed.

What Greg and co. aimed to uncover, like many editors since the eighteenth century, were the author's words, as he intended them to be set down². In order to do this, they sought to establish a genealogy of texts. The kinds of questions they posed, and sought to answer, were:

What were the origins of any particular text? Was it compiled from the author's 'foul papers' (hand-written manuscript), a scribal copy, or some other means?

How were printed versions related? Which were merely copied from earlier editions? What was a given text's 'parent'?

If a text is evidently corrupt, or - to use an apt metaphor - 'diseased', what are the sources and means of that corruption's transmission?

As is clear from the above summary, the New Bibliographers sought blood-lines within the mass of theatrical documentation. Using these marks of heredity, they could separate texts off from one another, the clean from the unclean. Which represented pure lines of descent, which were bastardised? Which copies were the more perfect, which comparatively deformed? From this schema stems a hierarchy of textual witnesses. Those occupying the highest rungs have Authority. They are the sources from which the author's original text can be reconstructed.

Part II

In their preface to the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623, entitled 'To the Great Variety of Readers', editors Heminge and Condell make the following statement:

'...where before you
you were abused with divers stolen and surreptitious copies,
maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of
injurious impostors that exposed them, even those are
now offered to your view cured and perfect of their limbs,
and all the rest absolute in their numbers as he conceived
them.'

Previous commentators had assumed that Heminge and Condell were referring to all quarto editions that appeared before 1623, in a fairly crass attempt to denigrate the competition. As was pointed out to illustrate the editors' supposedly mercenary natures, they had in many cases simply reprinted the quartos they seemed to rail at so heavily. It was Pollard (1908), however, who drew attention to the fact that the passage implies two groups of quartos. One group had presented their texts in mangled form; now even those join all the rest...cured in the Folio. The mangled group Pollard labelled the 'Bad Quartos'. These, he imagined, had been pirated editions, obtained by unscrupulous printers from the reports of unaffiliated actors (hired men), or even audience members who had witnessed performances.

Where a 'good' and 'bad' text existed for the same play, Pollard's hypothesis provided a mechanism to explain differences between them. Occasions when the needs of a hungry bit-actor and those of a mercenary publisher might coincide could be readily imagined. Such an actor, employed on a temporary basis by theatre companies, but not affiliated to any, might agree to recite his part, and what else he could remember of the play, to a pen-man, whose text would be the basis for a cheap edition intended to cash-in on a play's popularity. This imagined actor, a marginal figure at best, could hardly be expected to produce a flawless text. He might pad it out with lines from other plays he had acted in, or add his own (implicitly feeble) interpolations. Worse, his memory might preserve a bastardised 'acting version' of the play, with cuts to allow more space for the stage-business of clowns, verbal simplifications to ease the understanding of groundlings, and the unauthorised jests and interpolations of actors included. Subsequent researchers suggested other situations that might result in a memorially-reconstructed text. An acting troup might meet and pool memories, for instance, to recreate a lost prompt-book, or scratch companies for provincial touring during plague years in London might similarly create reportoires from memory.

In time, as the New Bibliography hardened into a paradigm, it came to be generally believed that a certain class of Renaissance play-editions existed whose texts originated as 'memorial reconstructions' of performances. They were marked, it was maintained, by a readily-identifiable set of stylistic quirks that indicated that a fallible memory had played some part in the texts' transmission.

¹Maguire, Laurie: Shakespearean Suspect Texts - the 'Bad' Quartos and their Contexts, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p.29.

²For an illuminating discussion of the authorial orientation in editing, its distinctions from the aesthetic and sociological modes of editing, and its evolution from a reaction by late seventeenth century Protestant biblical editors against Catholic textual scepticism, see Marcus Walsh: Milton, Shakespeare and Eighteenth Century Literary Editing, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

³Maguire, p.166.